UK air traffic agency rules out cyberattack in massive flight disruption

The UK's National Air Traffic Services (NATS) has ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the widespread disruption that crippled British airports this week, affecting tens of thousands of passengers including those on routes to and from India. The outage triggered roughly 2,000 flight cancellations, with major hubs including London Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and Manchester bearing the brunt of the cancellations and delays.

NATS Chief Executive Martin Rolfe told the BBC that investigators have excluded a cyberattack as a cause, while acknowledging the severity of the incident. "We will be doing a very thorough and full investigation. We have at this point ruled out a cyberattack," Rolfe said, adding that the service had not experienced such an incident in more than 50 years of operation.

Rolfe described the disruption as unprecedented, noting that no similar incident had occurred multiple times previously. "This will be something we haven't seen in more than 50 years of operation," he stated. The executive emphasized that the UK maintains one of the world's strongest reputations for both aviation safety and operational resilience.

The knock-on effects of the Tuesday outage continued to impact flight schedules and passenger plans into Wednesday, as the air traffic agency commenced a comprehensive investigation into the root cause of the system failure.